ohryan.ca

A Web Developer in Winnipeg

  • What I Learned About The State of Online Creation While Building a Web Comics Feed Aggregator

    What I Learned About The State of Online Creation While Building a Web Comics Feed Aggregator

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    Web comics were a big part of what I used to like about the old – pre-social-media – Internet. Diesel Sweeties, Penny Arcade, PVP, My Extralife, Nothing Nice to Say, Orneryboy, etc. I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but I just sort of forgot that web comics existed for a good decade plus. Sure some of these classics quit publishing and I think my sense of humour shifted away from others. Whatever the case, it really seems like web comics are back. Or at the very least my interest has been reignited.

    Recently in the past month or so, a few really great comics (strange planet, poorly drawn lines to name a couple) have popped on to my radar and I’m all in. Hard.

    Now that I’m back in I am bumping into an old problem. There’s not a great centralized location to read everything. In the past I’ve read web comics inside an RSS reader. But RSS readers never felt like the right context, their UI is too ridged, too geared towards written content or something.

    Do a search for “web comics reader” and you’re get various websites. Outdated websites from the early days of web comics. You’ll also find webtoons.com, a site that’s taking a good stab at solving this problem. I just don’t like it, it doesn’t feel right for me.

    Enter webfunnies.online. The beauty of an open internet is the ability for anyone with some development skills to build their own solution to a problem, just the way they like it.

    In the process of looking through dozens of web comics, I discovered some troubling things about the state of online creation.

    RSS

    RSS still exists as a solid machine-readable way to syndicate arbitrary content.

    However creators seem to have forgotten it exists. Less than 50% of the web comics sites I visited advertised and RSS link, even though every one of those made an RSS feed available and published it in the HTML source.

    Perhaps this is a moot point since feed readers are good at automatically discovering the

    Content Ownership

    A large contingent of content owners are publishing original content exclusively to platform like reddit, instagram and patreon. Platforms they don’t own or control. By “exclusively” I don’t mean that they are getting paid to post on those platforms (though in the case of Patreon may be). I just mean that they are posting original artwork directly to those platforms. They simply using those platforms as quick and dirty hosting.

    To put in another way, they are giving their intellectual property for free, to for-profit corporations who are using it to sell advertisements.

    This does not sit right with me. And I’m not even an artist.

  • The case for Facebook… or something like it

    The case for Facebook… or something like it

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    I am about to write something that is extremely unpopular amongst my peers in 2019: I like Facebook and I think can can be part of a healthy and productive online diet.

    Facebook has been getting high profile negative press almost daily, for what seem like a solid year. A lot of it is well warranted — Mark Zuckerberg seems to have a problematic view of privacy — and a lot of it may be FUD.

    This post is not a defense of Facebook.

    If you want to read a defense of Facebook, take a look at my post on Cambridge Analytica last year.

    A year or two after its public launch Facebook was an objectively good product that added value to the world. It presented a set of online tools in a way that was easy to use by completely average internet users. The features everybody flocked to are still in existence in the Facebook of today, they’re just largely buried under piles of garbage.

    Allow me to explain.

    Connecting with long lost friends and distant relatives.

    When I first joined Facebook it was a lot fun to connect with the kids I used to eat lunch with in the cafeteria every day in high school or that one guy you shared homeroom with in grade 7. At the time it was a novel way to connect with people, it felt groundbreaking and overwhelmingly, it felt good.

    Over the years the novelty has worn off obviously. And Facebook’s emphasis on “News Feeds”, combined with people’s penchant for posting contentious content (or the algorithm’s encouragement of this content) has make these distant connections more tenuous. From what I’ve seen around me, I think Facebook can seem like a stereo-typically bad, never-ending, year round Thanksgiving Dinner. It can can feel bad.

    But I really do think at it’s core, the ability to connect with your wife’s Grandma who lives in Edmonton could and should have a positive impact on the world.

    Photo Sharing

    Facebook was the first place that made it easy for me to share photos with a group of people. My extended family started to join Facebook right around when my kids were born, so I ended up using this feature quite a bit at the time.

    Unfortunately, photo sharing has really fallen by the wayside. I don’t use this feature any more and have even gone so far as to migrate photos from Facebook to Google Photos.

    Even so, I know my mom and others would still prefer the simplicity of sharing photos inside Facebook, rather than installing yet another app.

    Messenger

    Facebook Messenger is a decent, cross-platform instant messaging client. It’s almost my defacto Messaging app (especially now that I switched to Android). However, I do think there are some legitimate privacy concerns, so I actually don’t like using this one.

    Facebook Connect

    When it launched, Facebook Connect was groundbreaking. The ability to enable account signup/creation on other sites/apps without needing to enter a password or any other account information was amazing. It was a real move forward for online security.

    It still performs that function well, I’m just a little wary of how Facebook is using these connections.

    Groups

    I don’t use groups much personally. But they actually seem like a decent way to keep up to speed on a given niche or a local community. My wife always seems to know what’s happening at our school and in our neighbourhood, immediately. This feels good. This feels like the thing the internet was built for.

    Sure groups contain a fair bit of random gossip, the occasional spammer, asshole and that sort of thing. But I think that fact that groups are self-moderated goes a long way into keeping these communities sane.

    Groups feels like something Facebook should be focusing on more.

    So What?

    The media has been proclaiming Facebook’s death since the day after it launched. I first commented on people quitting Facebook 9 years ago. Maybe it’s more real this time, it’s hard to say. If I was more conspiracy minded, I might suggest that some nefarious puppet-master is leading a concerted effort to bring down Facebook. Or maybe just push down the stock price for a big short.

    As it stands, I feel trapped. There are absolutely no alternative to the type of “friends and family” community Facebook enables. There aren’t even any up-and-coming social networks in development that I’m aware of.

    At the same time, continuing to use Facebook seems like a mistake. If the dubious advertising and privacy practices aren’t enough to keep me away. Most of the posts that find there way to the top of my page are upsetting and I find myself hitting “mute” a lot.

    IMHO Facebook could do well to focus on those core features that brought people to the platform in the first place.

    So what now? Thoughts?


    BTW I’ve written a lot about Facebook in the past. I’ve linked some of my favourite posts above. But I think the full 12 year archive is pretty interesting. Check it out.

  • Netflix for My Dad

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    My parents bought their first new TV in roughly 20 years, replacing an ancient tubed dinosaur with a modern smart TV. Last night I set up Netflix for them.

    My dad is nearly 70, recently retired and finding himself with a lot of extra free time. He’s worked hard all of his life and hasn’t had much time or energy for movies and TV in 30 or 40 years. Suffice to say, Netflix’s library thousands of movies and TV shows extremely daunting to someone who has almost zero exposure to pop culture.

    With that in mind I set it upon myself to come up with some recommendations. It was a lot more challenging than I expected!

    My Criteria.

    Not ultra violent or sex-filled. I’m confident my dad would be turned off by most everything with a MA or hard R ratings. That said, he was a long haul trucker so language is less of an issue 😉

    Set in our universe. No lightsabers, phasers, magic wands, zombies, vampires, super heroes, etc. I get the sense these sorts of elements would be too distracting and take him out of the experience. It’s easy to forget how much we suspend disbelief in order to enjoy more fantastical movies. I’ve included one exception to this rule on my list – Guardians, it’s a good introduction to the more comedic Marvel movies and I’m really just interested what he’ll think of it.

    No Animation. See above. Though if Pixar movies were still on Netflix I’d have included a few.

    Well rated. I don’t want him to be turned off by bad movies. As inspiration I combed through Rotten Tomatoes’ top 100 movies for each of the past 25 years. Get Smart is an exception to this rule, included because I know he liked the old TV show.

    No TV Series. I thought about including TV shows, but jumping in to a show on episode 1 one can be a daunting proposition. Plus most TV series take a while to build, so I don’t think telling my dad to “watch The Office” would be terribly fruitful. The right thing to do would be recommending a couple of specific episodes. I included Dirty Money because it’s 6 episodes and I’m confident my dad would be interested in the content of each of them.

    Available on Netflix Canada. This was by far the most limiting factor. Netflix seems to have dropped a lot of content recently. So much so that I could not come up with a list of 10.

    The List

    • The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
    • The Bourne Identity
    • Dirty Money
    • Get Smart
    • Good Will Hunting
    • Guardians of the Galaxy
    • Hot Fuzz
    • Ocean’s Eleven

    This list seems incredibly short and it kind of is. I’m sure I’ve missed a few good ones. But mostly, the January 2019 version of Netflix Canada is just kind of sad.

    Feel free to leave a comment with your recommendations.